Tutorial-Class 6, Avoid cell distortion.

 I received some email reported they encountered a cell distortion.
Look at the sample:

orginal cell image file

cell distortion-sample

The reason is, Easy Mosaic resize your cell image to fill the mosaic cell size. and use the resized cell to form the mosaic. If your orginal image is not same aspect ratio to the cell size, there will be a distortion to the cell.

stretched cell sample

To avoid this distortion, you have two choices.

A: change your cell size, make sure it has same aspect ratio to your image collections. for example, most digital photos have a aspect ratio as 4:3, so you can set you mosaic cell size to 48×32 pixels, or 80×60 pixels , etc.
However, you may have a large collection of photos, and they dont have same aspect ratio. maybe some are 4:3, and some are 16:9, some are 1:1 etc.  In this case, you may need to set a middle value to reduce the distortion.

B: Crop all cell images.  This operation will cut some part from edge of cell image, the result image would have same aspect ratio as the mosaic cell.
There is a easy way to do the crop automatically.  just check ‘Crop Cell Image’ from the ‘Options’ page.

crop cell option

how crop operation works

croped cell sample

 See, there are no distortion now, you can try it yourself.

Auto crop might cut some important area from your cell image, I suggest you to do the crop operation manually with image editor softwares.
We have released a fast speed image crop tool for this kind operation. you can find it from Easy Mosaic’s folder by click ‘Toolbox’ from menu.
I am going to write a new tutorial for this tool soon.